According to History: Chpt. Two

They tell a religion, a font, a way of eating, dressing, build and make war, we did not know, customs that are unknown. Approaching those of us affect us, those away from it surprise us, but we all entertain. Less put off by the barbarity of the manners and customs of peoples so far apart, and even qu’instruits delighted by their novelty, it is enough that those in question are Siamese, Chinese, Negroes, or Abyssinians.

Or those whose manners painted Theophrastus in his Characters were Athenians, and we are French, and if we add to the diversity of the terrain and climate the long interval of time, and we consider that this book has been written the last years of CXVe Olympiad, three hundred and fourteen years before the Christian era, and so he made two thousand years ago that these people lived in Athens which he is painting, we will admire us to recognize ourselves, our friends, our enemies, those with whom we live, and that this similarity of men separated by many centuries or so complete. Indeed, men have not changed according to the heart and in the passions they are still as they were then and are marked in Theophrastus: vain, hidden, flattering, interested, cheeky, annoying, defiant, slanderers, quarrelsome, superstitious.